Please stop hugging me

I am a touchy person. I enjoy touching others and touching things. One of the reasons I became an Episcopalian is that in our belief in the Incarnation — that God became human and walked on two feet and touched and felt with two hands — we live with substances we can touch, feel, taste, and smell in water, wine, oil, incense.

I greatly value touch to convey relationship. As I get close to friends my arm is regularly around shoulders, or around my husband's waist if we're out and about. When I was in the 7th grade I was oblivious about my privilege and my experience of randomly putting my cold hands on others' faces or necks — even after they'd asked me not to. I was "just playing." The thought of it makes me shriek now.

Different kind of touches — romantic, friendly, ritual, etc. — all convey different levels of intimacy. As a general rule the first time I meet someone in a social or professional setting I shake their hand. If we become friends in time we may come to hug one another or offer each other a kiss of greeting. Unless we've met electronically and developed a certain kind of relationship, however, we never start with a hug. I suspect this is true for most people in their lives. Lately I've been more conscious as my touches grow beyond a simple greeting hug to ask, "Is it okay if I put my arm around your shoulders?"

Hugs convey a certain level of intimacy. The first thing I did upon seeing my mother after my wedding was hug her. My best friend and I greet each other with a lasting embrace when we're reunited across the continental US. I briefly hug my brothers and friends as we greet or part, sometimes but not always both.

I've found myself wondering lately, largely as I have become less and less comfortable with it, why people insist on hugging me when passing the peace — regardless of if I'm vested or not. In Celebrating the Eucharist, Patrick Malloy writes, "The Peace is a ritual act of reconciliation, just as the Eucharist is a ritual meal. It need not be protracted to be genuine, nor does every person have to greet every other person." (p. 127, emphasis in the original).

Part of what's made me increasingly uncomfortable is not that people want to give hugs inasmuch as they don't care if I do or not, whether they know me or not. This has been apparent when people have ignored my extended hand to put their arms around me or say, "We just hug everyone here!" Malloy wonders, "What sort of formation can help the entire assembly to recognize the Peace as a ritual action in which they all participate, not a recess in the ritual?" I have attended churches that not exactly that in the bulletin...

However Elizabeth Drescher noted, "Might be helpful to add what is not obvious to many: a handshake, a hug if you're more familiar with the person, or a friendly wave constitute the 'passing' gesture or 'greeting.' I've had students tell me that they thought some object was going to be passed around." Why are people so comfortable ignoring a social norm — to the point of ignoring someone's non-verbal communication — and hugging strangers? What does it say to visitors when their preferences about their bodies are ignored? How might survivors of assault, sexual and otherwise, respond to being violated?

Earlier today I read a New York Times opinion called "Losing our touch." In it the author wonders how much digital communication — replacing touch with touch screens and such — contributes to excarnation. As Christians we value the Incarnation, the messy earthliness of being human. I wonder if we lose our touch by not having appropriate boundaries about it, where it doesn't mean anything to hug a new person.

Our rituals offer places for safe touch: administering bread, passing peace, anointing with oil, smearing ashes. We chew and we drink, noticing texture and burning. What happens when the space isn't safe, though, when the level of touch is unwanted and unsolicited?

What is your experience? Are you comfortable with hugging strangers — or being hugged by them? How do you communicate your preference? Those in leadership, what training do you do about the Peace as a ritual action and what level of touch is appropriate for it?

Cheering from the sidelines

In the last few weeks the question for me has shifted from, "What do I think about the words 'tranny' and 'she-mail/male'?" to "What do members of the trans* community think and feel about those words?" As a self-avowed, practicing homosexual I'm okay self-identifying as a faggot from time to time — but I know some people are not comfortable with that word and I don't use it around them. I also know that when someone calls me that to create a dynamic of inequity because they're straight or see themselves as more masculine I shut it down.

I recently read an article that pointed out the sharp different between Justices Kennedy's and Scalia's approaches to gay people. Scalia consistently uses language that suggests there is no such thing as gay, just people doing gay things. When gay people say things like "Someone just putting on a wig," to describe trans* life, we're doing the same thing that was done to those whose shoulders we stand on  — ignoring the existence of trans* identity. To Justice Scalia we get gay married but not real married.

Telling trans* people to not be so sensitive is the same as principals and teachers telling the 15 year old gay boy — who may not be out to anyone, including himself — to not be so sensitive and just deal with the harassment. So quick and so right to denounce bullying of gay and lesbian teens, we then turn and ignore a group that says, "Hey, this is harmful to us."

On Facebook I've seen discussion from one particular friend who seems like he's beating a dead horse but may actually be changing minds, and I've seen others spout off in opposition to trans* people. I haven't said anything because I feel like I don't have a voice; I'm not trans*, so my opinion on the words doesn't really matter any more than the straight bully's to the gay kid in rural Florida.

I love the Castro, I love Hell's Kitchen, the West Village, and on occasion Gay Chelsea. I can love those gayborhoods because when majority voices told gays to get over themselves and buck up, to ignore the violence against them, to just toughen up they did — by challenging the problem and making their voices heard.

Are we going to unplug our ears or keep ignoring our past?

Andrew Sullivan, Good Friday, and "The Passion of the Christ"

When I read Andrew Sullivan's The Conservative Soul in the fall, many sections popped out at me. This is just one of them that I've been saving for Passion week. Sullivan is discussing the necessity of ambiguity and how fundamentalism doesn't leave room for it. In particular he discusses the film The Passion of the Christ and how the depictions of violence go far beyond what any of the evangelistic schools record — and the writers of the gospels include details when they want: the naked boy running away and the names of random people who are never heard from again, for starters. That they were not so detailed about the Passion itself was, I believe, intentional.

Here's Sullivan:

[W]hat was striking about the film as an art form was its abandonment of art. In such matters, what was important was veracity and precision, not interpretation and mystery. And so the movie was a masterwork of explicit, fanatical precision. It emphasized not Jesus’s message of love and compassion and the necessity to live faith through good works. It focused with astonishing zeal on Christ’s suffering as atonement for all human beings for all eternity. Its goal was to insist upon the centrality of Jesus’s self-sacrifice as the only thing necessary for human salvation. Or as one fundamentalist critic explained at the time, “The gulf we place between ourselves and God through sin is bridged only by that intense physical agony Gibson depicts and is taken to task for depicting.  

For a fundamentalist, this requires obsessing with almost macabre detail on the suffering Jesus experienced. While the Gospels often skip over the details of the Passion, Gibson homes in on it with sometimes fanatical zeal. The centerpiece of the movie is a scene of explicit, unrelenting sadism. It shows Jesus being flayed alive—slowly, methodically, and with increasing savagery. We first of all witness the use of sticks, then whips, then multiple whips with barbed glass or metal. We see flesh being torn out of a man’s body. We see pieces of skin flying through the air. We see Jesus come back for more. We see blood spattering on the torturers’ faces. We see muscled thugs exhausted from shredding every inch of this man’s body. And then they turn him over and do it all again. It goes on for an unrelenting ten minutes. And then we see his mother wiping up masses and masses of blood. What’s noteworthy here is that Gibson goes beyond anything even remotely in the Gospels. And he does so because he is concerned above all to be faithful to the doctrine of the atonement. To allow for Jesus to be merely brutalized, and to see his decision to give himself up as the culmination of a doctrine of nonviolence and love, would not be sufficient for a true fundamentalist. He has to show a level of savagery against Jesus compatible with the fathomless depth of human sin. And he has to do so as literally as he possibly can.  

Great art allows the viewer space to interpret, to ponder, and to think. Its meaning is often elusive, and designed to be so. Fundamentalist art views an elusive meaning as an invitation to error and sin; and so the movie had to remove any autonomy from its viewers. Gibson achieved this by relentless, stunning, unstoppable, graphic violence. It gave the viewer the same artistic leeway as a pornographic movie. Toward the end, unsatisfied with showing a man flayed alive, nailed gruesomely to a cross, one eye shut from being smashed in, blood covering his entire body, Gibson had a large crow perch on the neighboring cross and peck another man’s eyes out. Why? Because the viewer has to be broken down into submission; there can be no doubt about the violence of Satan—who is, of course, depicted literally in the movie. And so all the richness and subtlety and grace of centuries of Christian art is literally hammered into an inarguable, uncontestable demand that the viewer be emotionally brutalized into the sublime self-surrender of fundamentalist faith.

—Sullivan, Andrew (2009-10-13). The Conservative Soul: The Politics of Human Difference (pp. 35-37). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. Emphasis added.